It happened to me :( I thought this was super rare but I've run into a few other people to whom this happened so now I'm wondering, how many people have been laid off twice already this year?
I’m starting to wonder what the upside of working at a big tech company really is.
Stability: no (who knows when the next layoffs will be)
Base Pay: maybe (probably higher on average)
Stock: maybe - but a complete crapshoot
Fulfilling work: maybe, but it could be disrupted by politics, maybe some side feature of a side feature, or you might just get laid off anyway
Frankly it’s hard to trust putting your energy into something new after being let go. At least at a small company market performance might be more closely tied to your performance, not random politics or idiotic decisions.
Seems you go to a large company to chill out, save up base pay, but not really give it your all as so much is out of your control.
Tech companies are shutting down their junior pipelines and turning their most senior talent into burned out careerists who don’t care. They’re managing to mediocrity, not growth. Which honestly maybe makes sense in a non 0 interest rate economy. I just wish they’d be honest about it
It's the stock, but only when the stock is publicly traded.
I have zero trust in the long term outlook of my current firm. My stock vests every 3 months and I sell it immediately. This makes up about half of my total compensation.
If the company shows signs of going down I'll cut my losses and go somewhere else, probably when the stock drops to about 50% of my sign-on value. If the company starts going up then I get a nice little bump.
I joined Meta last year (and then got laid off 6 months later) right after their huge drop and several people (including my manager) were extremely vocal about how it wasn't fair that I got so many shares of stock. They compute the number of shares you get based on a dollar amount and the share price over the last month.
By comparison I feel bad for my brethren at large tech companies that aren't publicly traded. Stripe comes to mind here. My friends there say they've been told "we want to go public, but now just isn't the right time" all the way up until the valuation was cut by a third. Those golden handcuffs must be heavy.
>I have zero trust in the long term outlook of my current firm. My stock vests every 3 months and I sell it immediately. If the company shows signs of going down I'll cut my losses and go somewhere else.
That's funny - every business-related thread on HN contains complaining about companies focusing on the next quarter results, yet even when people are given stock on preferential terms and have information unavailable for retail investors, they'll still behave in a way that incentives company to do that. And then complain during next layoffs probably :-).
That is an interesting observation. On one side we could say when it is your own money one behaves more egotistically.
On the other side, if OP was satisfied in the current firm (they admit they are not) and could have an impact in the direction of the company (instead of short-term results) maybe he would hold on to the stock for longer.
Well that's why I think in the end a lot of current generation of IT engineers isn't very thoughtful.
They have tons of options for work which will align with your views, yet they keep choosing ones that pay the most in short term and will not accept anything more than 9-to-5 work with zero responsibility for the company.
I did the complete opposite and I think it went way better for me, but of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And their own place in layoffs.
The business commands the resources to decide if their strategy is long or short term. An employee selling stock grants has no such decision authority, and selling the stock is diversifying their risk in the long term.
I think it's totally fair. This is what the stock is worth today, and this is what they need to offer you in total USD. Why on earth should you accept a lower offer just because their stock is lower? And what a thing to have your own manager openly gripe about, yikes.
To be fair, I don't think this person ended up being involved in that decision. I've been in contact with them since and there doesn't seem to be any animosity.
There are plenty of more obvious reasons I was let go:
- I was in the last cohort hired before the hiring freeze.
- I had a terrible fit with my first team (this manager was on that team, but it wasn't with them) and put in for a transfer after about 3 months.
- The VP for that area came down pretty hard on me directly because this represented a permanent loss in headcount and made it clear that they'd be extremely upset if I pushed for it.
- I put in my transfer request anyway (the day that they announced transfers would be frozen), and was actually transferred about 5 minutes before the freeze happened.
- In my new team my new manager gave their two week notice on my first day.
- I enjoyed the work, but the new manager and I never really got along.
- I was one of two people on the team, the other person was in the same time zone as the new manager, and I wasn't.
Frankly I'd have been shocked if I hadn't gotten laid off.
Tech stocks have high volatility. If, for example, I joined Amazon at peak in 2021, and the stock crashed 50% over the next few months, it would still totally be worth it to stick around and vest. Even the case with smaller tech companies that achieved meme status like Palantir which suffered the usual post-IPO crash -- if I believe outlook will be positive in the long term. Could be 2 years or 10, doesn't matter to me. The stock being public REALLY helps. I would think about it very differently if it was private.
It's not just tech or publicly-traded tech companies, but a corporate culture of a few CEOs paid 500x the average worker. It's an owner-take-all gambit off the backs of workers who have to resort to relieving themselves in bottles for borderline wages.
This feels like the job prospect equivalent of saying "there's a 50/50 chance the sun rises tomorrow, either it does or it doesn't".
If by "big tech" you mean FAANG cos (and assuming "startup" means bay area YC tier), then a more accurate analysis is something like:
Stability: Lower likelihood of being laid off than the median startup in any given economic conditions. Way lower likelihood (I'd estimate <1/20th the risk) than early stage (series A/B)
Base pay: Higher than early stage startups, around the same for later stage (series C/D)
Stock: Much lower variance than startups, slightly higher EV
Fulfilling work: YMMV hugely depending on what you find more fulfilling. Making O(100M) users' lives 0.1% better? Big tech. Absolutely making the day of O(10) people? Startups
> I’m starting to wonder what the upside of working at a big tech company really is.
As opposed to working at a startup? Stability is way worse, base pay is lower on average, stock is an even bigger crapshoot, less perks, worse work-life balance. Work might be more fulfilling
How about as opposed to working for a generic normal business that isn't trying to play dumb games on the world stage and isn't some garage project that the CEO is incentivized to lie about consistently with the hope that it explodes?
I've worked for two very large (3000ish people) companies and it was great to have a day job that didn't have to become my identity, that understood that work-life balance is a thing, and that didn't pretend that "cool projects" were all that mattered. There isn't really any drama, there's no internal teams chats badmouthing management for a fake political stance (instead, these companies genuinely hire diversely, because those people are talented and perfectly capable of doing that job), and nobody is claiming my employer is the boogeyman. Neither company required me to pretend I wasn't working on blatantly immoral things that clearly make the world worse, and neither company has any intention of letting anyone go, because we didn't play cargo cult follow the leader blitzscaling during the pandemic in order to keep a death grip on the hiring market. This is despite one of those companies literally being in Silicon Valley
Well I'm working as the lead engineer at a startup for the past 3 years and can honestly say that fulfilling work is one of it. You are excited to go to work.. Another aspect might be softer things such as remote work and less bureaucracy. The company grew from 6 people to over 50 in that time with minimal funding.
That being said if someone has a .NET/React/NextJS/Node role (can also be 100% TypeScript) and I can work globally (wanna travel the world), I would switch in a heartbeat. European so not so expensive :)
> what’s the upside of giving a FAANG your all vs resting and vesting?'
Granted, the economy is very different than it was 5 years ago, but my very senior role at a startup paid about $185k w/no bonus, and 0.1% equity. 50+ hour weeks were the norm. We were acquired and I got $0 for the stock, but I did a $300k bonus (paid in 3 tranches over 18 months). I felt like I'd hit the lottery!
A couple years later, I joined a FAANG that paid me $100k just to walk in the door. Total pay, including stock ranged between $750k and $850k. My work week was 40 hours and I had so many fringe benefits and in-office amenities that I could never use them all. The work itself was also completely unfulfilling. I made it a few years before returning to a startup.
> Tech companies are shutting down their junior pipelines and turning their most senior talent into burned out careerists who don’t care. They’re managing to mediocrity, not growth.
I mean, how was this not the only possible outcome for current-day big tech companies? It's not like we haven't seen this exact thing play out before with the likes of IBM, Oracle (was Oracle ever 'cool'), etc.
Actually my experience has been than total comp (and perks) was higher (and guaranteed) until recently. The work frankly sucks (100s of leetcode to maintain yet another crud service), the passive aggressiveness, politics, infantilization all need the comp to be higher to justify selling an important part of your life sadly :(
I think pay is the only reason. Those big tech companies seem to pay a lot. They don't offer much stability, stock is only interesting for small but growing companies, and if you want fulfilling work, look for a company where you can really make a difference, and not a behemoth.
I don't think the difference is all that relevant for this discussion. They go up if the company does well, they go down if it does poorly. Receiving them instead of money is only really interesting if the stock price will go up a lot.
Sure, but big tech pay is comprised substantially of RSUs (like 20-80% of total comp in most cases), which are liquid, and those prices do swing quite a bit which dramatically impacts your take-home. There are tons of people who joined Meta in 2021 who are still making substantially less than the figures their offer letters, while some who joined in 2022 who are now making 7 figures based on the stock appreciation over the last half. At the end of the day, big tech gives you the highest floor, plus solid upside.
This is arguably a lot more interesting than ISOs or private RSUs, where you might have more upside, but dramatically more downside as well, including many scenarios where the equity is effectively worth zero.
I think you kind of underestimate the allure of this in a time where prices of goods and services are rising at a rate not seen in decades and the middle class is becoming locked out of decent, affordable housing.
stock is not a total crapshoot when you get issued more stock at regular intervals. At least where I work, if the stock price goes down it means you will simply be issued more stock.
There is no stability it corporate and there are no meaningful regulations to reign-in strip-mining capitalism seeking short-term profit maximization.
If you want economic security, you either have to build your own business or findothers who want to form a worker-owned co-op that resists the unfettered greed of corporate hegemony.
But it's not a sexy tech company. We build actual physical products that do things-- we're not a Matryoshka doll of web services hiding an advertising service in the middle whose only purpose is to trick users into giving up private information so that dick pill ads can be served more efficiently to them.
Nor are we trying to figure out how to use AI to serve you ads better.
It's slow, boring, work that pays well and is easy (mandatory) to leave behind after you clock out at 5pm every day. PTO flows like water, and the benefits are platinum-plated.
Of course, since we don't sell dick pill ads like Google, Meta, and the others there's no chance that our stock will erupt and leave us all multi-millionaires, so it's not "sexy".
I started out as a tech writer, part time while going to school, in 2007 and am now a Senior Principal Engineer.
Because we work on slow, actually real, physical, projects there is a lot of stability-- schedules are made in five year increments.
That, to me, is a "tech" company.
Internet firms whose only purpose is the sale of ads are just ad companies masquerading as a tech companies and I imagine such an environment might be somewhat volatile.
Allow me to introduce you to the concept of a "lateral move".
Plenty of tech-adjacent people like QAs (and tech writers) are self-teaching or going to school for CS. After a year or two they move into junior development jobs at the same company, provided management doesn't pigeonhole them. The rest of this person's 16 year tenure is plenty to climb the ranks from junior to PE.
Two ex-coworkers were laid off, got new jobs about 1 month after, and then were promptly laid off 3 months later. The good news for them though was that they got 3 months of severance, so they were actually pretty happy with that and ended up traveling on their old company's dime...
Me on the other hand, took me 6 months to find a new gig. I did find my job on HN Who's Hiring in January though! Ever since I've been working on https://hnresumetojobs.com to make it easier to find jobs from HN. Maybe it'll help you?
Best of luck OP. Keep your head up. You'll find something soon, this is just a transitory period. It's hard not to internalize the negative emotions that come with being laid off, but the reality is it really has nothing to do with your performance at work or worth as a human being.
Hey, I've got a friend who is looking, but for a different role than devs and designers. Otherwise, he'd love to use the tool. Any chance for adding more roles?
Funny to contrast this with people boasting on HN not too long ago about job-hopping twice a year or more. Loyalty works both ways.
After 40+ years programming I never expect much stability or loyalty from employers, though it happens. The tech industry revolves around short-term results, growth at all costs, and pumping the share price, which can work out in the employee's favor, but can also lead to over-hiring and layoff cycles, projects staffed and abruptly canceled, "pivots" as dumb ideas get played out.
Loyalty doesn't go both ways - many of my laid off colleagues had been with the company 10+ years and now are destitute in a very intense labor market.
I can't speak to individual situations. Many tech companies grew with unsustainable business models, over-hiring, and a focus on growth over sustainable profits. That was obvious over the last decade, the only question was when would the bubble burst. Now we know.
I've been through a few boom & bust cycles and layoffs during my career. Some companies care about their employees, and some don't. Employers -- especially in tech -- know their people will jump if they get a better offer, so they treat them accordingly, as interchangeable cogs. Many employers don't value loyalty or their people despite their phony values and mission statements, nothing surprising there.
Senior people with 10+ years still have options, the contraction will mostly hurt more junior people. But even seniors will have to reset their expectations: the adult day care/resort spa workplaces will disappear and people who want to get a job will have to look outside of the tech-oriented Silicon Valley sphere. I always fell back on enterprise logistics during tech industry busts -- boring compared to a hot startup, but reliable and profitable.
I know of several people who have experienced this recently either shortly before or shortly after getting a new role. Seeing multiple examples among my acquaintances tells me it's not that uncommon. Seems horrendous that companies can go from hiring to firing in the space of a few weeks, but that's the reality.
Generalizing heavily, I think layoff risks looks something like this (from most risky to least risky):
1. Startups in an immediate or medium-term funding crunch. Standards to raise money are much higher now than they were in the recent past, so a lot of companies will likely go bust if they don't trim expenses aggressively. This includes a lot of companies that look relatively legitimate, have users, have nice websites, successful raised multiple times in the past, etc. If you ask them, they will never tell you they are having trouble raising, so you have to do your own research to form an opinion of their funding status.
2. BigCos under pressure from shareholders to grow profitability due to rising interest rates and competition for investor dollars. They have plenty of money to keep people employed, but investors are demanding a pound of flesh. This is why you see share prices surge after layoffs are announced.
3. web3/crypto zombie companies that aren't in dire financial straights yet, but may be pressured to return capital to investors given recent events in the space. You probably don't want to work here anyway.
4. Well-funded startups that raised recently and are actively growing. Any runway issues they have are far enough out that you don't need to worry much today.
So my advice is: Pick a startup that raised recently and is building something that looks like it could be a real business with appropriate margins. No web3 crypto scams, no uber-style businesses that can't grow without heavily subsidizing the cost of their service, etc.
> Well-funded startups that raised recently and are actively growing. Any runway issues they have are far enough out that you don't need to worry much today.
I would have agreed with you 6 months ago but this describes both companies I was laid off from this year. Both closed 100+ million dollar rounds last May and June. Both valued at 1 billion+. Both bragged about their multi year runway days or weeks before layoffs began. Both had plans to grow significantly this year. My take is that the investors told them to do layoffs so they did. Which makes me want to work for a bootstrapped company that is growing slowly and will not take investor money
An old coworker was laid off 3 times in 2 years. He kinda just couldn't pick a winner. My advice to him (and probably to you if this is your position) is searching for large, stable, boring companies that employ software people. That's what I did after my recent layoff, which has gone well.
One of my old classmates is plugging away making apps for a city gov. Not making as much as possible but he’s not getting laid off and he’ll have a pension coming his way.
Yeah, people seem to want to nitpick that it's possible for a large, boring, stable company to have layoffs too, which is technically true, but it doesn't take a ton of logic or reasoning skills to conclude that companies that turn a profit will suffer less than companies that don't.
I worked for city government once. I hated it. I had zero autonomy and thus zero impact.
The team I worked for struggled to accomplish the most basic software tasks. They didn't even use source control. Everybody just zipped project files and emailed them to each other.
When I worked for government the team I was on lost members every couple of weeks. Eventually I was the last developer on the team joined by 4 managers. I also gave notice and on my last day they held sprint planning talking about the devolpment work they wanted to complete in the next sprint, they shuffled the tickets around asking me how long I think they will take, after a while I asked "As you all know, today is my last day, wouldn't it be better to look at this once you've hired someone?" and the presenter of the meeting got red faced and quiet and started typing rapidly and loudly. After an awkward silence the meeting abruptly ended and I never heard another word.
A friend works with software for the city. Took him a year of part-time work to get a basic web app made and deployed on Azure. He’d always complain that all his colleagues were incompetent save a few. I asked him why he doesn’t get a more ambitious job, but he likes how little results he can get away with delivering.
> Large, stable, boring companies lay people off as well.
Yep! But if you're looking for a company that has a better chance at surviving (or thriving) through a downturn, picking a company that actually makes money is generally a better take. See Hashicorp's recent layoffs and recent earnings statements as an example.
The general guideline isn't actually an amount: it's 3 - 6 months worth of living expenses. That is, what it takes to cover housing, transportation, food & utilities. If you're "living paycheck to paycheck" that's a problem, because it means 3-6 months worth of paychecks.
Personally, If you're living below your means, I would try to target 6 months to 1 year. Then again, the past 3 years have made me paranoid as hell. Your mileage may vary.
FWIW - I sleep a LOT better knowing I've got a year worth of expenses sitting in a high yield savings account. If I lost my job tomorrow? I'd say fuck it and take at least 4-6 weeks off before bothering to look for a job.
I did the same thing. Found a boring company literally 3 weeks before layoffs started. I saw it from a mile away. So far my job has been stable, but incredibly boring. I could be earning a lot more elsewhere, but given the market, I won't be switching unless there's good reason. WLB is the best I ever had.
This looks great, with a reasonable (suggested) price point. I'd love to see a bundle that would fix my neglected LinkedIn profile as well. For additional cost would be fine, if still affordable.
Skimming your site, something I didn't see in FAQs--is this human review, or are you currently or planning in the future on using ML to do these rewrites?
Not currently in the market, but if I were paying/tipping for a service like this, it'd be important to me that human eyeballs+hands were involved.
UK professional services industry — lay-offs over the last year were light compared to what I think is coming in the next 6 months. Agencies were first to rapidly downsize just after COVID, and I suspect the larger professional service firms are a few months away from the same treatment.
I've always worked in the services industry, and starting to see the same patterns before the agency lay-offs begin in the most established firms.
I think any organisation whose either dependant on public sector — or conversely, trying to scale with an operating loss, is in for a shock by year's end.
After being laid off I had the good fortune to get an offer from a remote first company. Now I'm moving back with my parents in case I get laid off again.
There's no way I'm signing a 1 year lease in the current economic environment.
In my case, the lesson that I took was that I shouldn't have taken the 2nd job. The job had some red flags, but I was uncomfortable saying no.
Thus, to apply back to your case: Remember, interviewing for a job is a 2-way street. Screen your employer carefully, and don't be afraid to say no. If you're in a situation where you can't say no, (IE, collecting unemployment,) try to make them say no to you.
1: All interviews were group interviews with all three founders.
2: They all worked together for almost a decade, since college.
3: They never hired anyone more experienced than them.
4: My technical screening was with a consultant. In a decade they hadn't figured out how to screen.
5: Their stack was mostly "also ran" technology. (IE, they didn't know when to cut their losses and change over.)
6: Their "tech lead" didn't have the title of CTO.
When I showed up, this was what I figured out:
1: The manager kept up appearances of consensus driven decisions. (Which was why interviews were never 1-1.)
2: They generally hired inexperienced people so they could control them and not have their decisions challenged.
3: They were dangerously fixed in their ways. It was like they were using Betamax, Commodore, 8-track, ect after those technologies failed, and didn't understand why it was dangerous to bet their company on it.
4: There were glaring, unprofessional, security problems.
5: The "tech lead" really flubbed a lot due to inexperience, but it wasn't obvious due to everyone else inexperience. The "tech lead" needed serious mentoring; but was too used to calling the shots.
I was working on a contract that was coming to a close, but I had a great rapport with the team and we had been talking about the next project for months with very clear and open dialogue about me sticking sound for it. Suddenly, there was no money for the next project. I wasn’t renewed and quite a few people on the team were laid off. It was a bit of a shock. I suppose it was foolish but I didn’t look for new work for a long time before the contract was ending, so I was completely caught off guard.
It has been very strange. I’ve never had a hard time finding work in my 12 years in tech. I’d only ever taken a while to find it due to being selective. I took time off to take care of my youngest son once, took 6 months or so to redirect learning towards embedded software and robotics “just because”, and always got right back to the whole full stack thing when I was ready.
I’ve applied to perhaps 30 positions and heard virtually nothing back. Had some great interviews that went cold. I have a feeling my resume is awful and I simply never needed to know that.
I’m optimistic though. I’ve always found myself in key roles on teams and provided critical work and guidance, so I know I’m not just some fortunate auxiliary person who happened to make it this far by luck or coincidence alone. With enough perseverance and humility I know I’ll find something.
I know all of you who are looking are having a rough time. All I can say is that things will always get harder, but they’ll get better too. After this, some time down the road, there’ll be something else to deal with too. You’ll figure that out just the same as you’ll figure this out. I suppose what matters isn’t what happens or why, but how you respond and move through it.
One silver lining is that I’ve been having a ton of fun learning more about things I’ve been curious about and generally furthering my career during downtime in ways I normally don’t get to. It might not seem meaningful or important at the moment, but it always pays off eventually. Plus learning is just fun, and fun is worthwhile. Especially when times are tough!
I got laid off for the first time ever a few months back. Still looking for a job.
Silver lining: it's been really informative to see the ways in which I'm failing interviews. It's painful, but I have enough info for taking corrective measures.
The randomness of interviews is whwt startled me when I started paying attention. Inused tobthink interviewing were meritocratic. But interviews are affected by randomness more than I imagined: interviewer/interviewee's mood, or being asked a hard question that's incidentally similar to something you've tackled can result in different impressions.
I appreciate the encouragement, but in my particular case I'm pretty clear on where I goofed:
- For two of the positions, I wanted to get more into LLVM (internals) development, but didn't have enough prior experience to get the position.
- For one position, I had to give a presentation on some aspects of an LLVM back end. I think my presentation was just too clunky. I used too much of my prep time getting up to speed, leaving not enough time for putting together a reasonable presentation. Or I just didn't know enough about LLVM back ends (at the time) for the position; hard to know.
- For one position (Waymo), I did badly on a live programming exercise. I hate them, but it seems clear that I need to spend some Saturdays practicing LeetCode-type problems. At least if I want to work for an Alphabet company.
Not this year but twice recently because of externalities: first time day one of COVID, and again recently because of banking crisis.
I can’t imagine going back to work for others. I haven’t settled on a plan, but it’s either overseas or self employed, in or out of tech. If I didn’t have a kid I liked spending most of my free time with I’d probably disappear with my modest satchel of gold coins to a remote corner of the world.
I used to joke I wanted to do something interesting, innovative, or creative. My POV has changed dramatically.
How about the reverse of this? Had to let go of 2 people because I do not know how to hire (apparently) as the people I hired looked good on resume, did ok in interview (but I may also be bad at that) but could not really perform the work ("simple" LEMP stack)
I’m curious, what were your interview strategies? What was it like when relatively simple work wasn’t getting done? Was there much communication, clarity, or accountability, or was it more opaque and drawn out without much communication or transparency around what was getting done?
I’ve worked with teams to address those problems in the past, especially in a remote context. It’s really hard, but it’s certainly possible to make it work. In many cases we managed to turn around “bad hires” and get people fairly productive with the right strategies, but it took a lot of work.
I wonder if it could be that with so many layoffs, people are applying to and accepting offers for jobs they don’t actually want out of desperation. Perhaps they’re perfectly capable of the work, but they aren’t engaged because they aren’t where they feel like they should be. No intrinsic motivation, thinking about other jobs (maybe even still searching for other jobs), burned out on being unhappy, etc. That’ll turn down performance for most people.
It’s hard to say! Having a bad time hiring is legitimately tough to deal with. For you, for the other employees, for the people who end up being fired… It can be turned around, though.
I've been laid off only once this year (thankfully?), still no offers after 4 months of interviewing. I am a mid level engineer and I feel like I am getting knocked out because of experience. It's just stunningly competitive. Summer 2020 was a better market than this.
Assuming you are in the US, 2020 saw the start of one of the most ridiculous hiring markets in the industry's history, so it should perhaps not come as a surprise - Meta alone added 13,000 employees in 2020, increasing headcount 30%. Many others did the same trying to ride that Covid wave during 2020/21 - future years may well look lean in comparison. Summer 2020 seeming good compared to 2023 should not feel surprising given what we know took place in the job market. This stayed hot right into early 2022 too.
When large firms like Meta and Google go on giant hiring sprees like we saw in 2020, it indirectly pushes up compensation offers from a lot of other software companies who also had to try to match these deals if they wanted to hire anyone good at all - everyone ends up competing with the large company offers. With those taps turned off, I've certainly noticed offers cooling too.
How's that working? Is it a surprise, like you go to work as you use to and then bang laid off? Or is it more like there are early signs so you think "maybe I should update my résumé but well it won't happen to me" and then it happens?
Both closed 100+ million dollar rounds last May and June. Both valued at 1 billion+. Both bragged about their multi year runway days or weeks before layoffs began. Both had plans to grow significantly this year. My take is that the investors told them to do layoffs so they did.
Stability: no (who knows when the next layoffs will be)
Base Pay: maybe (probably higher on average)
Stock: maybe - but a complete crapshoot
Fulfilling work: maybe, but it could be disrupted by politics, maybe some side feature of a side feature, or you might just get laid off anyway
Frankly it’s hard to trust putting your energy into something new after being let go. At least at a small company market performance might be more closely tied to your performance, not random politics or idiotic decisions.
Seems you go to a large company to chill out, save up base pay, but not really give it your all as so much is out of your control.
Tech companies are shutting down their junior pipelines and turning their most senior talent into burned out careerists who don’t care. They’re managing to mediocrity, not growth. Which honestly maybe makes sense in a non 0 interest rate economy. I just wish they’d be honest about it